The 10 Rive Shortcuts I Use Every Day

Between building animations in Rive and teaching the Masterclass, I spend most of my work hours inside this app. Over time my fingers have learned which keys are worth committing to muscle memory, and which ones the official docs list that I never press.

So when I sat down to write a "must-know Rive shortcuts" post, I refused to copy the docs and rank by importance. Instead, this list is what I actually press all day, ranked by how often my hand reaches for it.

Plus a bonus section at the bottom with three more advanced shortcuts worth knowing.

Let's count down.

#10. F: Fit selection to screen

You zoom in, work on a tiny detail, then need to see the whole artboard again. Hit F. The camera resets to fit whatever you have selected.

Sounds trivial, but it's one of the shortcuts I use the most. Every time you switch between Design Mode and Animate Mode the canvas changes, the UI takes up more space, and the element you were working on can suddenly shrink or fall off-screen. F re-centers you on whatever you have selected. You're always working fullscreen on what matters, even as the environment shifts.

I hit it 50 times a session without thinking.

#9. Option+drag on an object: Duplicate while dragging

Designers know this one from Figma and Sketch. Hold Option, drag an object, you get a copy at the new position. Way faster than Cmd+D and then reposition.

I use this for placing repeated elements: bullets in a particle field, ticks on a clock face, anything I'd otherwise duplicate and nudge into place ten times.

#8. Select keys + Option+drag first or last key: Scale animation timing

You finished an animation. It's too fast. Or too slow.

Select every keyframe in the timeline, hold Option, drag the first or last key. The whole animation stretches or compresses proportionally. Spacing stays intact, only the duration changes.

I retime animations with this constantly during reviews. Beats keying everything by hand a second time.

#7. Y: Freeze Mode

Hit Y to enter Freeze Mode. Now you can move an object's or a group's origin (pivot point) without affecting its children.

Critical for setting up clean rotations and scales. If the pivot isn't where you need it, the animation looks broken. Without Freeze Mode you'd be moving children too every time you adjust the origin.

I reach for this whenever I'm rigging a group for rotation, scale, or any animation that needs a specific pivot point.

#6. N: Component Tool

The fastest way to drop a Component on the stage. Hit N, click where you want it, pick from the menu.

If you're using Rive without Components, you're leaving most of its power on the table. Components are how Rive scales from one-off animations to reusable design systems. This shortcut puts that workflow at your fingertips.

#5. Cmd+click (Mac) / Ctrl+click (Win): Deep Select

Rive's X-Ray move. Click through nested groups to grab the element underneath, without expanding the hierarchy first.

If you've ever clicked on a button and selected a parent group three levels above the thing you actually wanted, this shortcut is the cure.

#4. Comma and Period: Move playhead 1 frame

The animator's heartbeat. Step forward, step back. When you're cleaning up keyframe timing or hunting for the exact moment a movement starts, this is the tool.

Hot tip: hold the key down. The playhead scrubs continuously, like a slow-motion timeline scrub without touching the mouse.

#3. Shift + Comma / Shift + Period: Move playhead 10 frames

The 1-frame nudge (one above) is for precision work. This one is for navigation. Jumping around a 5-second animation in 10-frame chunks gets you where you want fast.

Pro tip: combine with the 1-frame nudge for surgical placement. Want to land 7 frames forward? Jump 10 forward (Shift + .), then 3 back (,). Faster than tapping a single-frame nudge seven times, and far more precise on tight timing.

#2. Cmd+D: Duplicate

Copy and paste in one keystroke. The duplicate lands exactly on top of the original, ready to nudge, drag, or reposition wherever you need it. The most-pressed shortcut in any design tool I've ever used, Rive included.

#1. Cmd+G: Group

The shortcut I press more than any other in Rive.

Groups are the backbone of how you organize anything: hierarchy, hit areas, transform pivots, animation targets, layout containers. Cmd+G to group, Cmd+Shift+G to ungroup. If I had to pick one shortcut to never lose, it's this one.

Bonus: 3 more worth knowing

These didn't crack the top 10 but they earn their keep.

Shift+Space: Play default State Machine from Design Mode

You don't have to switch to Animate Mode to test your interactivity. Hit Shift+Space anywhere in Design Mode and your default State Machine plays. Saves a Tab press every test cycle, and over a build session that adds up.

Cmd+K: Search anything by name

A search bar pops up. Type the name of any layer, animation, state, or artboard, and jump straight to it.

For a small file this is overkill. For a project with 50+ artboards it's the difference between a 2-second jump and a 30-second hierarchy crawl.

Cmd+Opt+drag (Mac) / Ctrl+Alt+drag (Win): Stagger keyframes

Newer feature, criminally underrated. Select multiple keyframes, hold Cmd+Opt, drag. The keys spread out in the order you selected them.

The move for cascade animations: list items that fade in one after the other, particles that staircase across the screen, buttons that pop in sequentially. Pro tip: selection order controls the cascade direction.

What I cut from the list

A few that almost made it:

• Tab (switch Design/Animate Mode). Most people use the toggle in the UI without thinking about it.

• U (reveal keys for selection). Useful but situational.

• Cmd+Shift+C / Cmd+Shift+V (copy and paste styles between objects). Copies color and stroke only. I wish it grabbed more properties (scale, corner radius, the rest), but for matching fills and strokes across objects, it saves the round trip.

• Cmd+R (rename in the hierarchy). The standard rename shortcut, familiar from every other design tool. Convention you don't have to relearn.

Quick reference

If you'd add one I missed, send me a note on LinkedIn.

Want to go deeper into Rive? The full Rive Masterclass walks through everything in this list and a lot more, with real animations you build along the way.